Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Stocks going out of business

A lot of stocks have been beaten down a lot over the last 6 months but the following 3 seemed interesting when a fellow trader and I were looking at them.

RHD and IAR both belong in the same industry. They both do yellow pages and white pages directories. With everything moving online, obviously it's not much of a growth industry. But both these stocks have been annihilated over the last 6 months, with IAR down to $5 from a 52-week high of $38 and RHD down to $6 from a 52-week high of over $80. When we looked at these two stocks, we first noticed that IAR continues to make money, just with no growth. In fact, it's only trading at a P/E of about 2. So that doesn't seem so bad right? But then we looked at the key statistics and according to the numbers on Yahoo finance, both IAR and RHD have 9-10 BILLION in debt. Yikes. With growth turning negative, how are shareholders going to see any returns? It will be interesting to see how these two companies turn out though. It's not like yellow and white pages will become totally obsolete any time soon.

Another stock that's been beaten down that looks interesting is HLYS. I remember trading this stock when it IPOed in the mid $30s and we kept saying to ourselves, it's only a shoe with a wheel in it. Well, people seem to finally have caught on to that and it's down to $4.30 now after its most recent earnings report. However, the key statistics look a lot more interesting. According to Yahoo finance, this company has no debt and $3.30 per share in cash. Those numbers are surprising. It's currently trading at only $1 above how much cash the company has on hand and the company still makes money (again with negative growth though). Seems to me to be a good play for a personal trade, buying a little at this price and if it trades below the cash holding level obviously there's something wrong, but otherwise, it still has 30% of its float short and could easily squeeze up a couple points for some good risk/reward.

No comments :